Video transcript

Thought I would do
a video on communism just because I've been talking
about it a bunch in the history videos, and I haven't given
you a good definition of what it means, or a good
understanding of what it means. And to understand
communism-- let me just draw a spectrum here. So I'm going to start
with capitalism. And this is really just
going to be an overview. People can do a whole PhD
thesis on this type of thing. Capitalism, and then I'll
get a little bit more-- and then we could
progress to socialism. And then we can go to communism. And the modern
versions of communism are really kind
of the brainchild of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx was a
German philosopher in the 1800s, who, in his
Communist Manifesto and other writings, kind of created the
philosophical underpinnings for communism. And Vladimir Lenin, who led
the Bolshevik Revolution in the-- and created,
essentially, the Soviet Union-- he's the first person to make
some of Karl Marx's ideas more concrete. And really every
nation or every country which we view as
communist has really followed the pattern
of Vladimir Lenin. And we'll talk about
that in a second. But first, let's talk about
the philosophical differences between these things,
and how you would move. And Karl Marx himself
viewed communism as kind of a progression
from capitalism through socialism to communism. So what he saw in capitalism--
and at least this part of what he saw was
right-- is that you have private property,
private ownership of land. That's the main
aspect of capitalism. And this is the world that
most of us live in today. The problem that he
saw with capitalism is he thought,
well, look, when you have private property, the
people who start accumulating some capital-- and when
we talk about capital, we could be talking
about land, we could be talking
about factories, we could be talking about any
type of natural resources-- so the people who start
getting a little bit of them-- so let me draw a
little diagram here. So let's say someone has
a little bit of capital. And that capital could be a
factory, or it could be land. So let me write it. Capital. And let's just say it's land. So let's say someone starts
to own a little bit of land. And he owns more
than everyone else. So then you just have
a bunch of other people who don't own land. But they need, essentially--
and since this guy owns all the land, they've got
to work on this guy's land. They have to work
on this guy's land. And from Karl Marx's point
of view, he said, look, you have all of these laborers
who don't have as much capital. This guy has this capital. And so he can make
these laborers work for a very small wage. And so any excess
profits that come out from this arrangement,
the owner of the capital will be able to get it. Because these laborers
won't be able to get their wages to go up. Because there's so much
competition for them to work on this guy's farm or
to work on this guy's land. He really didn't think
too much about, well, maybe the competition
could go the other way. Maybe you could have a
reality eventually where you have a bunch of people with
reasonable amounts of capital, and you have a
bunch of laborers. And the bunch of people would
compete for the laborers, and maybe the laborers could
make their wages go up, and they could eventually
accumulate their own capital. They could eventually start
their own small businesses. So he really didn't
think about this reality too much over here. He just saw this reality. And to his defense--
and I don't want to get in the habit of
defending Karl Marx too much-- to his
defense, this is what was happening in the
late 1800s, especially-- we have the
Industrial Revolution. Even in the United
States, you did have kind of-- Mark Twain
called it the Gilded Age. You have these
industrialists who did accumulate huge
amounts of capital. They really did have
a lot of the leverage relative to the laborers. And so what Karl Marx
says, well, look, if the guy with all the
capital has all the leverage, and this whole arrangement
makes some profits, he's going to be able
to keep the profits. Because he can keep all
of these dudes' wages low. And so what's going to happen
is that the guy with the capital is just going to end
up with more capital. And he's going to have
even more leverage. And he'll be able to keep these
people on kind of a basic wage, so that they can never acquire
capital for themselves. So in Karl Marx's point of
view, the natural progression would be for these people
to start organizing. So these people maybe start
organizing into unions. So they could collectively
tell the person who owns the land or the factory,
no, we're not going to work, or we're going to go on strike
unless you increase our wages, or unless you give us
better working conditions. So when you start talking
about this unionization stuff, you're starting to move in
the direction of socialism. The other element of moving
in the direction of socialism is that Karl Marx
didn't like this kind of high concentration-- or
this is socialists in general, I should say-- didn't like this
high concentration of wealth. That you have this
reality of not only do you have these people
who could accumulate all of this wealth-- and
maybe, to some degree, they were able to accumulate it
because they were innovative, or they were good
managers of land, or whatever, although
the Marxists don't give a lot of credit to
the owners of capital. They don't really
give a lot of credit to saying maybe they did
have some skill in managing some type of an operation. But the other problem is is
that it gets handed over. It gets handed over
to their offspring. So private property, you have
this situation where it just goes from maybe father to son,
or from parent to a child. And so it's not even based
on any type of meritocracy. It's really just based
on this inherited wealth. And this is a problem that
definitely happened in Europe. When you go back to
the French Revolution, you have generation after
generation of nobility, regardless of how incompetent
each generation would be, they just had so much wealth
that they were essentially in control of everything. And you had a bunch of
people with no wealth having to work for them. And when you have that
type of wealth disparity, it does lead to revolutions. So another principle of moving
in the socialist direction is kind of a
redistribution of wealth. So let me write it over here. So redistribution. So in socialism, you can
still have private property. But the government
takes a bigger role. So you have-- let me write this. Larger government. And one of the roles
of the government is to redistribute wealth. And the government
also starts having control of the major
factors of production. So maybe the
utilities, maybe some of the large factories that do
major things, all of a sudden starts to become in the
hands of the government, or in the words of communists,
in the hands of the people. And the redistribution
is going on, so in theory, you don't
have huge amounts of wealth in the hands of a few people. And then you keep-- if
you take these ideas to their natural
conclusion, you get to the theoretical
communist state. And the theoretical
communist state is a classless, and
maybe even a little bit-- a classless society, and in Karl
Marx's point of view-- and this is a little harder to
imagine-- a stateless society. So in capitalism, you
definitely had classes. You had the class
that owns the capital, and then you had
the labor class, and you have all
of these divisions, and they're different
from each other. He didn't really imagine a
world that maybe a laborer could get out of this, they could
get their own capital, then maybe they could
start their own business. So he just saw this tension
would eventually to socialism, and eventually a
classless society where you have a central--
Well, he didn't even go too much into the details
but you have kind of equal, everyone in society has
ownership over everything, and society somehow
figures out where things should be allocated,
and all of the rest. And it's all stateless. And that's even harder to think
about in a concrete fashion. So that's Karl Marx's
view of things. But it never really
became concrete until Vladimir Lenin shows up. And so the current
version of communism that we-- The current thing that
most of us view as communism is sometimes viewed as a
Marxist-Leninist state. These are sometimes
used interchangeably. Marxism is kind of the pure,
utopian, we're eventually going to get to a world
where everyone is equal, everyone is doing
exactly what they want, there's an abundance
of everything. I guess to some
degree, it's kind of describing what happens in
Star Trek, where everyone can go to a replicator and
get what they want. And if you want to
paint part of the day, you can paint part of the day,
and you're not just a painter, you can also do
whatever you want. So it's this very utopian thing. Let me write that down. So pure Marxism is kind
of a utopian society. And just in case you don't
know what utopian means, it's kind of a perfect society,
where you don't have classes, everyone is equal, everyone
is leading these kind of rich, diverse,
fulfilling lives. And it's also, utopian is also
kind of viewed as unrealistic. It's kind of, if you view it
in the more negative light, is like, hey, I don't
know how we'll ever be able to get there. Who knows? I don't want to be
negative about it. Maybe we will one day
get to a utopian society. But Leninist is kind of the more
practical element of communism. Because obviously, after the
Bolshevik Revolution, 1917, in the Russian Empire, the
Soviet Union gets created, they have to actually
run a government. They have to actually
run a state based on these ideas of communism. And in a Leninist
philosophy-- and this is where it starts to become
in tension with the ideas of democracy-- in a
Leninist philosophy, you need this kind
of a party system. So you need this-- and he
calls this the Vanguard Party. So the vanguard is kind of
the thing that's leading, the one that's
leading the march. So this Vanguard
Party that kind of creates this constant
state of revolution, and its whole job is to guide
society, is to kind of almost be the parent of society,
and take it from capitalism through socialism to this
ideal state of communism. And it's one of
those things where the ideal state of
communism was never-- it's kind of hard to
know when you get there. And so what happens
in a Leninist state is it's this Vanguard Party, which
is usually called the Communist Party, is in a constant state
of revolution, kind of saying, hey, we're shepherding the
people to some future state without a real clear definition
of what that future state is. And so when you talk
about Marxist-Leninist, besides talking about
what's happening in the economic
sphere, it's also kind of talking about this party
system, this party system where you really just have one
dominant party that it will hopefully act in the
interest of the people. So one dominant
communist party that acts in the interest
of the people. And obviously, the negative
here is that how do you know that they
actually are acting in the interest of people? How do you know that they
actually are competent? What means are
there to do anything if they are misallocating
things, if it is corrupt, if you only have a
one-party system? And just to make it clear,
the largest existing communist state is the People's
Republic of China. And although it is controlled
by the Communist Party, in economic terms it's really
not that communist anymore. And so it can be confusing. And so what I want to do is
draw a little bit of a spectrum. On the vertical axis, over
here, I want to put democratic. And up here, I'll put
authoritarian or totalitarian. Let me put-- well,
I'll put authoritarian. I'll do another video
on the difference. And they're similar. And totalitarian is more an
extreme form of authoritarian, where the government
controls everything. And you have a few people
controlling everything and it's very non-democratic. But authoritarian is kind
of along those directions. And then on this spectrum, we
have the capitalism, socialism, and communism. So the United States,
I would put-- I would put the United
States someplace over here. I would put the United
States over here. It has some small
elements of socialism. You do have labor unions. They don't control everything. You also have people working
outside of labor unions. It does have some elements
of redistribution. There are inheritance taxes. There are-- I mean it's not an
extreme form of redistribution. You can still inherit
private property. You still have safety
nets for people, you have Medicare,
Medicaid, you have welfare. So there's some
elements of socialism. But it also has a very
strong capitalist history, private property,
deep market, so I'd stick the United
States over there. I would put the USSR--
not current Russia, but the Soviet Union
when it existed-- I would put the Soviet
Union right about there. So this was the-- I would put
the USSR right over there. I would put the current
state of Russia, actually someplace over here. Because they actually
have fewer safety nets, and they kind of have
a more-- their economy can kind of go crazier,
and they actually have a bigger
disparity in wealth than a place like
the United States. So this is current Russia. And probably the most
interesting one here is the People's Republic of
China, the current People's Republic of China,
which is at least on the surface, a
communist state. But in some ways, it's more
capitalist than the United States, in that they don't have
strong wealth redistribution. They don't have kind of
strong safety nets for people. So you could put some
elements of China-- and over here,
closer to the left. And they are more-- less
democratic than either the US or even current Russia,
although some people would call current Russia-- well,
I won't go too much into it. But current China, you could
throw it here a little bit. So it could be even a
little bit more capitalist than the United States. Definitely they don't even have
good labor laws, all the rest. But in other ways, you do
have state ownership of a lot, and you do have state
control of a lot. So in some ways, they're kind
of spanning this whole range. So this right over
here is China. And even though it is called a
communist state, in some ways, it's more capitalist
than countries that are very proud
of their capitalism. But in a lot of other ways,
especially with the government ownership and the government
control of things, and this one dominant
party, so it's kind of Leninist with less
of the Marxist going on. So in that way, it is more
in the communist direction. So hopefully that clarifies
what can sometimes be a confusing topic.